Understanding Bounce Rates

Listed Under: Forex Affiliate Marketing

As affiliate marketers, bounce rates are critical to the overall performance. While a lot of attention goes into optimizing your websites for search, not many webmasters pay attention to tweaking their websites to enjoy a lower bounce rates. A key metric that’s useful for any type of website is it’s bounce rate. This figure can tell you whether your visitors are finding what they want when they arrive at your site, and whether they’re interested enough in your content to explore your site further.

The Google definition of bounce rate is as follows: “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.” So the lower the bounce rate the better, as this means more of your visitors are clicking through to other content on your website. Bounce rate is particularly useful for e-commerce sites, since it measures how well your visitors are engaging with your site, and hence how likely they are to buy your products.

In this article you find out what bounce rate is and how it’s measured. You also look at why bounce rates are important to your site, and how to tell if your bounce rate is too high.

A bounce usually means that the visitor arrived on your site, took one look at the page they landed on, decided it wasn’t right for them, and left. Therefore, your site’s bounce rate can give you a good idea of whether your visitors are engaging with your site. As a general rule:

• A low bounce rate indicates that the site is attracting the right kind of audience, and that visitors are exploring the site’s content.
• A high bounce rate suggests that visitors aren’t finding what they’re looking for when they arrive on the site, and are going back to their search engine to find something else.

Reasons on Having High Bounce Rate

These are the common reasons why a website may have a high bounce rate:

1. Loading and Error IssuesViewers are impatient when it comes in loading a website. If it takes too long to load, users tend to just close the window or find another site related on what they are looking for.
2. Poor Web Content Another element viewers are looking for on a website is a good content. Good and enticing content gives your viewers a drive to read more and explore your site from one page to another.
3. Poor Web DesignThere are a lot of ways where you can decrease the amount of your bounce rate. But before anything else, start from the thing where you have all the control on what to choose from. Start decreasing your bounce rate by designing your website properly.

   The design of a website is a great factor where you can decrease your website’s bounce rate.

4. AudioMany users will exit your site immediately if they start hearing something they don’t like. Remove anything that automatically starts making a noise, such as soundtracks and auto-starting videos. This applies to both speech and music.
5. Compatibility If 50% of your audience still use Internet Explorer 6, and your site breaks in this browser, then 50% of your audience will leave. Test in all relevant browsers.

What is a “good” bounce rate?

So what is an acceptable bounce rate? As you’ve probably guessed from the above, it’s hard to say, as it varies wildly from site to site and market to market.

As a general rule, if you’re running a site that expects visitors to engage with it — such as an online store — then your bounce rate should probably fall in the 20-50% range. On the other hand, if your visitors’ goals can be accomplished with a single page view — such as reading an article, or finding a contact phone number to call you — then you can expect a higher bounce rate, in the region of 60-70%.

Measuring overall bounce rate

Your overall site bounce rate gives you a good indication of your site’s success and relevance to visitors. To see your overall site bounce rate in Google Analytics, click the Visitors option in the left hand menu. Then click Visitor Trending and, in the submenu that appears, click Bounce Rate:

Take a look at your site bounce rate over time. Is it going up, or going down? Can you see any big jumps in the bounce rate? If so, did you make any big changes to your site, or start a new ad campaign, around that time? The bounce rate can reveal whether your changes have had a positive or negative effect on your site.

Measuring bounce rate by search keywords

Many visitors are likely to reach your site via search engines by searching for various keywords related to your site’s topic. Google Analytics can show you the bounce rate of each of these keywords.

To view this report, click the Traffic Sources option in the left hand menu, then click the Keywords option: Once you’ve done that, click the Bounce Rate column to sort the keywords by bounce rate.

Armed with this information, you now have a good idea which areas of your site are performing well, and which parts could benefit from a lower bounce rate.

• Use good quality, fresh content
• Make sure your website content is relevant
• Use “related info” links
• Use clear call to action
• Use clear navigation
• User-test your website and landing pages

Tools to monitor/get feedback for your site

There are a lot of tools you may purchase on the web in collecting feedback on your site. Here are some of them:

Concept Feedback
Five Second Test
Please Critique Me
Userfly